[102]
But it is of the first importance that we
should know what are the requirements of time,
place and character on each occasion of speaking.
For the majority of these figures aim at delighting the
hearer. But when terror, hatred and pity are the
[p. 507]
weapons called for in the fray, who will endure the
orator who expresses his anger, his sorrow or his
entreaties in neat antitheses, balanced cadences and
exact correspondences? Too much care for our words
under such circumstances weakens the impression of
emotional sincerity, and wherever the orator displays
his art unveiled, the hearer says, “The truth is not
in him.”
IV. I should not venture to speak of artistic
structure1 after what Cicero has said upon the subject (for there is I think no topic to which he has
devoted such elaborate discussion) but for the fact
that his own contemporaries ventured to traverse his
theories on this subject even in letters which they
addressed to him, while a number of later writers
have left on record numerous observations on the
same topic.
1 Composite in its widest sense means “artistic structure.” But in much of what follows it virtually = “rhythm.”
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